Face of Pluto emerges from the shadows

Pluto is so far from Earth—5.8 billion km—and so small—just two-thirds the size of the Moon—that even the largest ground-based telescopes have never been able to resolve its surface features. Now, for the first time since the discovery of Pluto by Clyde Tombaugh in 1930, space scientists have seen the face of the most distant planet. Using the European Space Agency's Faint Object Camera aboard the Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute, Marc Buie of Lowell Observatory, and Laurence Trafton of the University of Texas at Austin collected a dozen visible light and ultraviolet images of Pluto in June and July 1994. Figure 1a is the global map of 85% of Pluto's surface, as assembled by computer image enhancement software from four separate images. Figure 1b reveals the opposite hemispheres of the planet as seen in blue light; the small, inset shots are actual photos from Hubble, while the larger images are drawn from a global map reconstructed by computer.